The 3 AM Demons

As it would happen, I need to go into work this morning for the first time this semester, but at 3:15 AM, I awoke and haven't been able to lull myself back to sleep.  This used to happen to me every so often as a young adult, and truly doesn't happen much anymore.  Usually when it does, there is some over-riding reason for the anxiety I awaken with.  I feel the anxiety physically and yet feel a need to sleep, like it is a bad dream.  To get back to sleep, I try to visualize placing the problem in a box and closing the lid. Usually it helps.  This time, I couldn't place a finger on what to put in the box, and visualizing myself getting in became problematic and rather Freudian.  So I made a list.

Here were my worries as I recall:

1. The polar vortex. I was actually dreaming about it. And Scotland.
2. I am not a grandparent yet. What if I am not good at it?
3. I think I might have sounded arrogant at my first NCMEA meeting. Or pessimistic. Or I don't know how I sounded. But I should worry about it apparently.
4. Is my best friend from college back from visiting her daughter in Scotland? Where is she?
5. My courses for next term. Just because I get anxious before I teach.
6. Life insurance policies. I cancelled our big ones but how much is enough for us?
7. Travel woes.  Will I be able to save the money, and find the money, to go to Brazil for the International Society of Music Education Conference in July? I applied for two sessions to present. Was that a mistake?
8. NAfME - why did you take the researchers/higher educators away from the practitioners? That really upsets me on so many levels.
9. My children. Just because I can.
10. The far right politics of NC that have irritated my liberal sensibilities beyond belief.
11. Being reimbursed 30 cents a mile when I drive for over 100 miles to visit student teachers. But I get 56 cents a mile for 99 miles. And is that one trip? total miles? why did it change? who is the committee that sent that down through the college of ed? I am so confused on why that is fiscally sound. Or necessary.
12. Itchy skin. It may have been the initial reason I woke up.

So I am hoping when I see this list in the middle of a bright January North Carolina afternoon, I will laugh. Some of these are pretty silly. I mean, politics and polar vortexes (or is it vortexi?) aren't really anything I can do much about other than what I am already doing...staying informed, using my vote, being involved. Oh, and keeping warm.  If my friend is or isn't in Scotland, she will let me know when she has the time I am sure.  Being a grandparent isn't something I have much control over either now that I think about it.  Surely I will figure it out the same way I figured out how to be a parent. Oh, shoot, now I feel worried about that. I'll move on.

I suppose that some of these worries have real weight.  Money matters, family, facing your own mortality.  All are serious issues, but at three in the morning, they become this blob of anxiety.  Then there are professional line items.  Not sure there is much I can do about NAfME or whether or not my comments at NCMEA were odd or interpreted differently than I intended, but the fact that I can't wrap my mind around the sense of the mileage claims has really stuck in my craw.  Perhaps my son-in-law can explain that one to me.

Finally, the itchy skin that kind of comes and goes. I really need to let a medical professional look at it again because the online stuff can be way too freaky to wade through and might create further worry. It better not be chocolate or coffee causing that. That would just be mean.

I am pretty darn sure most of us are anxious about things and are awakened by a list of anxieties occasionally.  The 3AM Demons I usually call them, and I wonder if there is a research study detailing why that happens and if early man suffered from them as well.  Did I kill that animal fast enough or did it suffer? Really, does the cave need to be bigger and need more fire pits? Can I get a replacement on our bear rug soon, or is this going to be another ten-year ordeal? And how about my contemporaries that I admire? And do famous people worry about things the same way or more famously and fabulously? Or do those folks have anxieties in a different vortex (or would that be vorti)?  And now that I am thinking about it, why do we call this blast of polar air a vortex again? I didn't listen very well at all yesterday when Al explained it I know now.

How do you cope with your demons at 3AM?  Do you visualize a place to tuck your problems or anxieties away for later? Is there a trick I am missing? Right now, I am thinking warm milk and a soft blanket curled up on the couch with a cat on my lap might help keep them at bay so I can get some sleep. After all, I need to be up in two hours!